This works, for me usually 15 / 5 minutes, depending on the complexity of the task. For things that are very hard to do or for times when I don’t feel well at all, switching helps immensely. Usually it’s 5 minutes of a task that requires a lot of willpower, 5 minutes of something easier, 5+ minutes of pause. For tasks requiring more uninterrupted contentration, tasks that are easier for me, and when I feel well and productive, I go for 25 minutes / 5 minutes of pause.

This system is also nice because it implements the age-old rule of “rest before you are tired”. (I found that when I feel tired, it’s probably too late to rest, and my productivity is already impaired. I can force myself through it, but it would mean that I’d pay for it the next day.) So the best metric I found for the exact ratio is the amount of willpower it takes to do something.

To implement this, I always used https://onlinetimer.ru/, and it’s absolutely perfect. You can even drag and drop individual timers and create bookmarks out of them:

i3 / i3status

But since I use it really a lot, I decided to make another keyboard shortcut for a timer, and visualize it in my i3 statusbar, to have a nice overview.

i3 is a(n awesome) tiling windows manager for Linux. Its statusbar is controlled in .i3/config:

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bar{

output eDP

status_command i3status--config=~/.i3status-small|~/.i3/wrapper.py

strip_workspace_numbers yes

mode hide

modifier Mod4

position bottom

output_format="i3bar"

}

This is the config for my smaller screen, which hides the statusbar except Mod4 (=Win) is pressed. It executes status_command, which in turn generates a statusbar with i3status using a certain config file, and then pipes the output through .i3/wrapper.py

My .i3status-small is not too creative. Maybe the only nontrivial thing is a run_watch which tells me if a VPN is running:

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run_watchVPN{

pidfile="/etc/openvpn/mv.pid"

}

It checks if the file /etc/openvpn/mv.pid exists, if it does – the VPN in running. The vpn is run via the following aliased command:

aliaso='sudo openvpn --writepid /etc/openvpn/mv.pid --config'

The result looks like this (click to enlarge)

i3status wrapper for custom commands

I added the following lines in .i3/config. The first line executes utimer, countdown 15 minutes, pipes the output to a textfile and plays a sound at the end of its execution. Third line kills the player.

I needed to prepend the timers to the statusbar, so I cound see how much time is left. For this, I used this excellent wrapper script. It’s built based on i3statusbar’s input protocol, documented here.

I added the following lines, heavily commented:

Python

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j=json.loads(line)

# Files with the output of utimer:

tfile="/home/sh/s/sounds/outbash"

tfile2="/home/sh/s/sounds/outpomo"

tfile3="/home/sh/s/sounds/outpause"

defrtime(tfile,color):

withopen(tfile,"r")asf:

# last line of the file

try:

t=f.readlines()[-1]

exceptIndexError:

t="O"

# Utime seems to add a \n(^M?); at the end

# We use it as a way to check that the timer has stopped

# When it stops, a \n is added.

if"\n"notint:

to=t.split("ing:")[1]

j.insert(0,{'full_text':'%s'%to,'color':'%s'%color})

tcolor1="#FF0F02"

tcolor2="#FFFFFF"

tcolor3="#FA0FF2"

rtime(tfile,tcolor1)

rtime(tfile3,tcolor3)

rtime(tfile2,tcolor2)

print_line(prefix+json.dumps(j))

It’s quite a dirty solution, but it works. When there’s text, it gets outputted on screen after being split. If the timer program finishes, it outputs a \n instead of a ^M, and nothing is shown. They are colored so I know which timer is which.

I also added a third timer, which I can run from CLI and which both makes a sound and a popup, with optional text. Heavily based on this forum post. Its file also gets read by wrapper.py.

ZSH

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tm(){

localN=$1;shift

(utimer-c>~/s/sounds/outbash$N&&mpg123-q~/s/sounds/tib.mp3&

zenity--info--title="Time's Up"--text="${*:-BING}")

}

The statusbar with all three timers active looks like this:

Sometimes they break, probably because of the hack-y way I use to read the files outputted by the timer. Restarting i3 (which does not close any programs and is not a problem) helps, I have a shortcut for that.

As part of a course at my university, I needed to learn to do semi-basic mathematics in Wolfram Mathematica. I knew that it’s highly unlikely that I would ever use the (closed-souce, paid) program ever in the future if I’ll need to do scentific computation and/or visualization, simply because of my disliking such (closed-souce, paid) programs, and asked if I can do what was required using some different tools. For example, to see if I can use Sympy and Jupyter Notebook to do the same. Both professors agreed to this (which I really appreciated!), and I started. In this post I’ll describe my experience with Jupyter, Sympy and Matplotlib/Pyplot. If you want to follow along, the exact Notebook I use in this post is on Github, in German.

The typical end-of-year thingy will also happen, as it has the last five years! But this spring I stumbled upon this, and I think it has potential! Changing “travel outside the US” and “how many states did you visit” to my cases, also not changing 2013 to 2017 everywhere, but othertwise leaving it as it is.

2) What was your favourite moment of the year?
The summer trip to the Carpathians, Shypit waterfall and the Synevyr lake. (Ahaha, sounds so weird in English!)

Most of my camping trips and most of the travelling was absolutely awesome.1

On a professional level, FedCSIS 2017. It made me feel with my entire skin that science is awesome and that I am mostly able to do it, if I apply myself. That it’s one of the few areas where I will be able to capitalize on my strengths and compensate my weaknesses.

3) What was your least favourite moment of the year?
Everything leading to my diploma, my diploma itself, and the horrible results I got. It put me out of balance for more than a month.

4) Where were you when 2017 began? Who were you with?
Lviv, a very nice and small apartment, with M. It was snowing, and it was absolutely wonderful.

5) Where were you when 2017 ended? Who were you with?
Ukrainka, getting and unpacking presents after eating awesomely. It was incredibly nice.

6) Did you keep your new years resolution of 2017?
Mostly not, because I can’t remember any that I did. This year won’t make this error.

7) Do you have a new years resolution for 2018?
Unitasking and minimalism.

8) Did you make any new friends in 2017?
Yes, but many more “discoveries” regarding people I technically knew that turned out to be awesome, once I talked to them more.

9) Did you travel outside of the Ukraine and Germany in 2017?
Yes! Quite more than usual. Italy, the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands in February, and hitchhiked through Poland if that counts.

10) How many different oblasts did you travel to in 2017?
Одеська, Закарпатська, Львівська, Черкаська (Умань?), Житомирська, Полтавська (Диканька!)

Thuringen (Ilmenau!), Sachsen (Dresden! … and Leipzig, ofc).

I know I’m forgetting a lot, in the future I will keep better track of my trips. Pictures are nice but hard to navigate through.

11) Did you lose anybody close to you in 2013?No one died, but I lost one person I care about.

12) What was your favorite book you read in 2013?
“The defining decade” (a book I needed ot read earlier, and which influenced a lot of how I see life) and “Napoli ’44” (extremely interesting on many many levels). Honorable mention “The Gifted Adult“.

13) What was your favourite movie that you saw in 2013?
This year I actually watched more movies than before! Best one is definitely “Casablanca”.

14) What was your favourite TV show that you saw in 2013?
A couple of weeks ago binged through ~12 episodes of Rick and Morty at someone’s house and enjoyed it much more than I would have expected, and actually finished watching it at home, all the 3 seasons. Since it’s the only show I watched, let it be it.

15) What was your favorite music that you heard in 2017?
This year I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed Отава Ё.

16) Did you drink a lot of alcohol in 2013?
About as much as the previous years. Nothing I would consider unhealthy.

17) Did you do a lot of drugs in 2013?
Nope.

18) How many people did you date in 2013?
One.

19) Did you do anything you are ashamed of this year?
Definitely, mostly related to abandoning and ignoring people, disappearing when there were things I needed to do, etc. I can’t do otherwise. But I want to write all of them before the end of 2017 and say sorry.

20) What was the biggest lie you told in 2017?
Nothing I can immediately recall. I might have changed some parts of some stories I told to make the people unrecognizable and to make it harder to connect the dots, but I don’t consider it immoral or wrong. (Even though some people would).

Oh, okay, there’s one though. Won’t write it here for now.

21) What was the worst lie someone told you in 2017?
Nothing I can recall.

22) Did you treat somebody badly in 2017?
Yes, again because of my disappearances. Some people were hurt.

23) Did somebody treat you badly in 2017?
Also no. I seem to have a talent to hang out with the right people.

24) How much money did you spend in 2017?
More than needed on certain occasions. Will keep much more track of it in 2018. It’s one of the areas I’m least happy about this year. The week in Prague was much more expensive than needed.

25) What was your most embarrassing moment of 2017?
TODO. Anything related to avoiding people and the floors they are on for months and accumulating guilt about it and then meeting them would fit here. Not many of such moments though, I’m good at avoiding people.

26) If you could go back in time and change one thing in 2017, what would it be?
Spend more time on my diploma and get a different advisor for it.

27) What are your plans for 2018?

Mental health:

Sleep well.

In bed by 2230, no phone after 2300, eyes closed by 0000 max.

At least 8h of sleep.

Wake up and stand up by 8.

Eat well

Avoid sugar.

Everything else balanced.

Sport.

Gym or BWT when that’s not available.

Jogging.

Buddhism+Mindfullness+Meditation. And go deep with it.

Concentration and unitasking.

Professionally:

Genetical Algos and Comp. Linguistics — know them at a level where I can honestly say “I know them” and understand papers about them.

At least five small finished passive income projects in the first six months. Move fast and break things.

At least two published papers.

At least 5 “serious” art pieces, any kind.

Life in general:

Disappear and avoid people less often.

Minimalism and uncluttering in as many areas of my life as I can manage

As much unitasking as possible.

When you rest, REST and do nothing else.

More time with my (extended) family.

Draw and develop my creativity more.

28) What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before?
Went to a scientific conference! Published a paper!
Hitchhiked through a country that is not Ukraine!

Made a keyboard layout!
Created my own shorthand system and I keep developing it!
Made a website that is mildly entertaining to someone else but me!
Worked at a bar as an Engel at 34C3! And worked in a cloakroom there.

29)Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope. My former best friend got married to a friend of mine, though, which is nice 🙂

30)What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017?
Time with my family. Depends just on me though.

31)What date from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?19-20 March, when I got into a small-ish car crash and reevaluated by life values just a bit. Ditched Escitalopram after a couple of days.

32)What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Wrote and published a nice small not-revolutionary paper, but still, fwck yeah! Felt absolutely awesome

33)What was your biggest failure?
My B.Eng diploma.

34)What was the best thing you bought?This camping mat. Exceptionally multiuse and nice. Made my life and travels better.

35)Whose behaviour merited celebration?
M

36)Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
A(.) friend of mine.

37)Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Same
ii. thinner or fatter? 2kg fatter. And this is a good thing!
iii. richer or poorer? Same

39)What do you wish you’d done less of?
Spent time in bed with my phone.

40) How did you spend Christmas?
NA, but probably in Leipzig with R

41) What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 21. I didn’t want to do anything for anyone and keep it to myself, as is my right 🙂 and I went for four days to Amsterdam. It was really nice.

42) What was your personal fashion concept in 2013?
I stated getting heavily in polo shirts and the colours gravitated to blue, dark blue, and black almost completely. Also got a really nice blue coat <3

43) What kept you sane?
“Stay calm and stay with people”.

44) Which celebrity figure impressed you the most?
none at all

45) What news story do you remember most from 2017?
None at all

46) Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2017.
Rest before you are tired. Balance your energy strategically. Do the things that are right to do before you feel tired and unbalanced.

47)Quote a song lyric or poem.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
And I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That’s fine with us. Every morning
We glow and in the evening we glow again.

They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.
Which is fine with us.

This is a “stream” I got a couple of months ago as I was doing Image Streaming before sleeping. It was much more interesting than usual and I copied the recording to another place on the phone to find it later, but I seem to have lost it. All this from memory, so none of the many details that accompany an ISR sessions, just the gist.

The question at the beginning was “Will I ever be able to live a life I am happy about?”

The vision

I was lying on my back in a really nice meadow. You know, the type of places one can have in memories of childhood, something almost Blake-like, but a bit darker and with higher contrast.

The meadow

It would have been a really nice meadow, but the sky was black, without a moon or without stars. The ground was emanating light from the inside (from bottom?), there was a really nice glow on everything.

I was lying on my back, trying to enjoy it all, but I just couldn’t. “I am in a meadow and people usually lie on their back and rest and feel happy, I should feel happy, I am supposed to enjoy this, why am I not enjoying this.” I couldn’t understand what was wrong. Then I tried to stand up but couldn’t, I was glued to the meadow. I kept trying to stand up, but the meadow held me tight. The gravity was very strong.

Then I felt knives “growing” from the ground. They were the size of pens, made out of an aluminium-like1TIL that both spellings are okay, aluminum and aluminium metal, and they went through my body, and I felt them disturbingly realistically. With them passing through arteries and blocking the flow of blood, which I felt flow in my stomach and through my tissues. I felt them in my mouth, through my eyes, it was absolutely horrible. (I assume in real life shock would have set in and I wouldn’t have to feel it all).

I still could not move, the knives were going through my body and bones, cracking them, it was horrible.

The Bird

Then I saw a bird, looking like an ostrich, about a third bigger in height than me. It was flying in my direction, and landed about 2m to my left, in my field of vision. It was gray, with long legs that looked like wood, and it looked pretty haggard. Not in a “I’ve flown though a thunderstorm on the way here” haggard, but more “I lived for two hundred years and this is how I am, and I’m old and wise enough not to care much about what you think about my looks, I don’t think about them at all, in fact”. Basically, the difference between dust that accumulated over the summer in an unused part of a country-house and dust that accumulated for millenia in an underground cave.

As cliche as it sounds, I felt it was older than time itself. I would write that it had something of the old wise owl in it, but it was also deeply inhuman. Not necessarily evil, but just impossible to understand. Not above human morals, not lacking human morals, but slightly to the left of human morals. Something cold, distant, rational, immensely old, immensely wise, and utterly incapable to be interested in anything. 2If it was clear that the bird was male or female, I would still have used it. On a scale from 0=male to 100=female it was purple, as the quote about writers’ life goes.

It wasn’t transcendentally old, scary and incomprehensible like the Lovecraftian Old Ones, a bit less transcendentally old, scary and incomprehensible than they. It wasn’t an emanation of some god, it actually lived in that body, and the body was completely material.

The most striking were its eyes. They were completely black and blank. Not “existing but black”, not “existing but too dark to see”, not “absent”, but it’s almost like they were an interrupt of the spacetime continuum. I’m not sure if it was looking at me or not. I’m not sure if it could see me. I’m not sure if it could see in a typical meaning of the term.

Suddenly I felt it invited me to ride it, the knives immediately retreated to the ground, my wounds instantly healed, and I found I could stand up. I climbed on its back and we flew. The feathers felt dirty and plastic, and its neck felt like wood. It carried me under the glowing ground. Everything around me looked kind of like a glitch in a videogame, when you fall under the textures.

We were flying lower and lower. It didn’t use the wings, it somehow slid through matter, and it was a very strange feeling. Imagine you are a point in a Cartesian coordinate system, and your coordinates are natural numbers, and then you start riding a function that belongs to the set of real numbers, you had no idea this was possible.

The Sphere

Lower and lower, and it was getting darker and darker, because there was no matter around us to reflect light, but a really strong light source shone below us. It was a white-blue energy sphere, and it had inside all the energy, all the matter in the world. It was the opposite of the empty eyes of the bird. The eyes had no matter and no place for matter, no place for emptiness, because emptiness still needs a place to exist, and the sphere had somehow more matter than matter itself. The closer we got, the more I felt it on my skin and inside my skin.

I felt/saw/understood that all geometry and matter in the world is connected to frames, wires, whatever you want to call them, they are the ones that hold them in place, like a net holding everything together, a net of meta-matter. And that sphere was the center of the coordinate system, where all the (radial) wires started. The sphere was holding them all together and was the source of energy the frames used to hold the matter. And the closer we got, the stronger was this energy field, almost meta-energy field, and the denser was the framework.

The bird also seemed to be also affected, it felt this energy as much as I did. I was happy that at least something connects us. Though the Bird is so strange and incomprehensible, we have some things in common.

We flew really close to the sphere, the sphere full of raw energy, of life, of vitality, of connectedness-between-matter, reality. The density of the matter itself was the same, it’s just that the matter itself (and my body, and the bird) were much more matter-like, more real than reality itself. (God, I sound like Haruki Murakami this entire post, but no other way to describe this.)

A current went through my body, and I saw the grid, I saw the relativity of space-time (only after touching it I understood that the sphere was controlling time the same way as it did matter), I touched Absolute Reality. I didn’t feel any other external reality, I didn’t feel that our reality was somehow “less important”, I didn’t see God or gods, I didn’t see any Lovecraftian timeless monsters, I knew that it was the deepest level that’s possible in this reality, and that this reality was probably the only one existing.

Even in regards to “this reality”, I didn’t “see everything”, everything that was or will be, didn’t feel enlightened, didn’t feel the suffering of all the creatures in the universe, or whatever cliches might apply. I maybe expected to feel OH WOW OH GOD NOW I UNDERSTAND. Even though I felt that I was touching something deep and fundamental, I felt underwhelmed.

Back to the meadow

I didn’t get any deep knowledge, didn’t get the ability to manipulate matter, or keep feeling the wires holding it together. 4 It wasn’t a level of abstraction that was possible in daily life. An old metaphor I used a couple of ago when discussing logic: you are a car made out of this constructon set. You exist and move only where the set allows you, since it’s an inherent limitation of the construction set you are made of. You can conceive only changes that are possible using your universe of screws and holes. Nothing else can exist. Then someone sprays some paint on you with a brush. You won’t see it and notice it, it is none of your concern and nothing you are able to understand. Or someone bends one of your pieces — going absolutely against the rules you thought holy and the only possible. Or are the king in a chess game, then someone takes you and hides you in his pocket, one turn before checkmate.

After I returned to the meadow, I didn’t see or feel any wireframes, and didn’t need them. But I felt empowered and able if not control, than to at least navigate the space around me. The meadow didn’t have any power anymore, I could walk, thought I remembered that the knives are there somewhere below. It has a heavenly meadow like it was supposed to be, and I felt happy, and could enjoy the meadow and its dark sky as I thought I should.

ISR as techique is pretty interesting. It heavily intersects with lucid dreaming and with all the bursts of creativity I get right before falling asleep. (When I think of things as I’m falling asleep, it’s always easy to see when I’ll lose touch with reality — it’s when my thoughts start getting really weird, and though I still feel the bed and my thoughts and can think critically, I know then that sleep is maybe 40 seconds away.)

When I was a child, I remember hearing songs before falling asleep and in my dreams, songs with actual nice background music and rhymes that were created in real time. I remember remembering the songs and rhymes in the morning, and they were actually quite nice. Also my dreams back them were very long and complex, with multiple story lines. It’s sad that I never wrote them down.

I still feel my subconscious is able to do amazing things, and is even better at creativity and divergent thinking than I am.

After QS, the next big area of things I want to explore would be learning to use my subconscious to generate ideas or solve problems. This sounds like something out of the New Age Bullshit Generator, but in my case, I was shown multiple times what my subconscious is capable of. If only I could remember it all as I did when I was a child.

If it was clear that the bird was male or female, I would still have used it. On a scale from 0=male to 100=female it was purple, as the quote about writers’ life goes.

3.

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Stolen from the Simpsons, “this would have been the perfect moment for it to start raining”, can’t find the episode.

4.

↑

It wasn’t a level of abstraction that was possible in daily life. An old metaphor I used a couple of ago when discussing logic: you are a car made out of this constructon set. You exist and move only where the set allows you, since it’s an inherent limitation of the construction set you are made of. You can conceive only changes that are possible using your universe of screws and holes. Nothing else can exist. Then someone sprays some paint on you with a brush. You won’t see it and notice it, it is none of your concern and nothing you are able to understand. Or someone bends one of your pieces — going absolutely against the rules you thought holy and the only possible. Or are the king in a chess game, then someone takes you and hides you in his pocket, one turn before checkmate.

Pchr8board

You might remember the last twoposts about the Dvorak Mirrorboard layout. Well, I’ve updated it for the third time, and it’s gotten different enough that I think I can call it Pchr8board, just to have a better name and to reflect the fact that it’s made for my own personal use and not as some kind of general-purpose layout, though it could be a nice starting point for further changes.

Ladies and gentlemen, Pchr8board:

Keys without a legend have the same letters attached.

Otherwise, this is how you read the picture above:

The layout uses left alt as a Latch key, that, when pressed with left thumb, switches the letters to their corresponding right-hand letters, as per original Mirrorboard, but for Dvorak.

Other important changed keys are highlighted.

Enter and BackSpace are on the Tilde (“~”) key.

The Tab key allows to type forward slashes (“/”), mostly for searching, and diaereses (ümläüts) on the letter immediately following Shift+Latch+Tab (awkward at first, but not more so than the typical compose key approach).

The layout is usable as a typical Dvorak one, and I wanted to add a couple of more keys that I miss. For the right hand, there are:

Direction keys on the Latch+”htnc”, which are the base keys for the right hand

A Backspace key on Latch+r

I sorely needed both of those, since they required too much movement in a traditional layout. What’s also nice is that all the keyboard shortcuts still work, that is for the OS it doesn’t make much difference. Selecting words word-by-word using Ctrl+Shift+right_arrow as Ctrl+Shift+Latch+n still works, for example. In practice such chords are much less complicated and easier to get used to than they seem. Honest.

At first, I wanted to add the arrow keys to the left hand, but didn’t find a not-awkward way to do this. Next version, maybe. Another logical change would have been using hljk or someting, since this is what I use for my i3wm shortcuts, but, again, I think keeping it classic in this aspect would be more beneficial.

Installation instructions:

Either just setxkbmap left3 or integrate it in whatever you are using (e.g. setxkbmap -option 'grp:rshift_toggle, compose:rctrl' left3,ru,ua)

In case you want to edit it, copy it every time to a new name. The layout gets cached to the DE, and for it to read the new changes you would have to reload X, unless it’s a new file. Or just during editing do xkbcomp mirrorboard.xkb $DISPLAY 2>/dev/null as recommended in the original post, maybe removing the last part to see any errors.

Cambridge Brain Sciences is a nice way to measure brain health. After quick (~10 minutes) tests, it gives you your score in three main areas (Verbal, Reasoning and Memory) and your C-Score, which is “the summary of your cognitive function”. It’s meant not as a semi-static measure (~IQ), but as a “how are you feeling today” kind of thing.

I use it both as a way to track/manage some depression symptoms, and as an objective way to measure how various things influence your mental performance (think exercise/nootropics/sleep/…). I wrote a bit about it and how I use it here.

It’s pretty awesome, but lacks a CSV export, or even just a way to get the data in a readable format, without having to hover on their charts. I wrote them (they are pretty responsive and open to suggestions, by the way) and they said that they will add that as a planned feature. I didn’t want to wait (patience is not one of my virtues) and wanted to start running some analyses on the data I have, but didn’t want to it down manually. Hovering over the data points in their chart to get the individual data points would have been very very tedious.

Looking at the source code (and hoping to find some “data.json” or something similar), I saw that for their charts they use Highchart. After skimming the documentation, I wrote small and extremely basic javascript snippet that would output the dates and datapoints of the currently open chart:

Then, if you need the verbal/memory/reasoning data, just switch to that tab and repeat the process.

For individual tests the process is very similar.

The snippet is the same, but you need to change the “chart” parameter. Switch to the “Tests” page, then right-click on the needed graph, “Inspect element”. You are looking for the data-highcharts-chart parameter:

This is the number you need. Set it in the first line of the snippet (chart=” “) and run.

To work with the data, I pasted it into LibreOffice calc with the following settings.

You need the “Separated by space” and “Merge delimiters”.

That way, it gets outputted to different cells, and you can copy the ones you need. I’m sure Excel can do something similar.

To merge the AM/PM on the other cell, I used the following formula to convert the time:

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=TIMEVALUE(TEXT(B37,"HH:MM:SS")&C37)

with B37 as cell with the time, and C37 as cell with AM/PM.

I hope I’m not infringing any terms of service, it’s not even scraping — just accessing the data already in the graphs. And I am not doing a tool or Greasemonkey script out of this, because I think that I won’t need to do this often (I add the data manually at the end of each tests if I do them), but if there’s interest, I could do something more “beautiful” and portable — let me know!

Straight from my quotes file, with sources mostly missing. But all of those are easy to Google.

“Experience by itself teaches nothing… Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.” ― W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education

Home is where the water tastes normal

You don’t need the cow to get the milk

It might be best to let go of finding meaning in life from your job. Try to find a low-stress slack job that pays the bills and leaves you energy to do other things, and then find meaning in life from those things. This will also allow you to shift from one interest to another.

The best thing about being a hybrid – you don’t have to be particularly good at either yet people are constantly blown away by the simplest things.

My personal belief (and mantra of creativity/slacking) is that if you do something people have never seen before, you will always exceed their expectations.

“It’s easy to pretend expertise when there’s no data to contradict you.”

“Hack Like Nobody’s Watching (because it is highly likely that nobody is watching)”

Pay more attention to what the losers do wrong as to what the winners do right

Title: somethingsometing (should be avoided)

And I will deny that I ever said this, but …
Aren’t you a little worried that there’s a hell?
Your original research was thought-provoking, although it would be considered felony in most states.
Generally you want your alibi not to be a witness at the scene of the crime. (Daria)

LPT: When you’re thinking about buying something you don’t necessarily need, imagine the item in one hand and the cash in the other. Which one would you take?

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. ~ HH Munro
What is said when drunk has been thought out beforehand. ~ Flemish proverb
If you buy the why, the how is infinitely bearable. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. ~ Robert S. de Ropp
The best use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. ~ William James
Only the simplest mind can believe that in a great controversy one side was mere folly. ~ AJ Kane

Practice choosing discomfort

Real men don’t need either condoms or antivirus

Welcome to the Internet. Consider this a threat.

My friend is epileptic. One time after her seizure I asked if she knew me. She looked up at me and eventually said “Mom?” in a very uncertain tone. I’m a little younger than her and I have a beard.

The above may or may not describe the last time SWIM from another university had anything to do with data analysis, statistics, and empirical methods of software engineering.

This post shortly describes my current understanding of the basics of Quantified self / self tracking, how exactly I [am planning to] do this, how am I planning to analyze this, and what am I hoping to get from this.

Quantified self

EDIT: I do things now a bit differently, and I’ve split the big spreaadsheet file in multiple smaller ones; also I’ve ditched BWT in favour of classic gym workouts. But mostly this is still relevant.

For me, it all started with this excellent post by the creator of Wolfram Alpha, about how he tracked a lot of things for decades. It’s a very interesting read.

Quantified self (QS) is a movement / subculture / set of methods and approaches dealing with tracking various things about oneself, and then, hopefully, analyzing them, and getting interesting insights. One can think of QS as of a more targeted variant of a typical scientific study. I can read that “Scientific study confirms 5-HTP taken at bedtime improves sleep quality” or see “man, I swear, since I started doing Image streaming my memory, attention and weight have improved, girls started smiling at me, and I started speaking French!” on Reddit, or I can actually do an experiment and see if it improves my sleep (or French).

Some things don’t generalize, and if I find something that works for me (even though it doesn’t work for anyone else, isn’t scientifically sound, or doesn’t even make sense), it is still a very interesting discovery, if I can use it to make my life better. This guy discovered that standing on one leg until exhaustion improves his sleep, for example.

As someone who has been doing this for a couple of weeks, one of the more interesting discoveries is that my subjective estimates of my concentration, memory etc have very little to do with how well I can perform tasks that require them. Just now, I logged the following:

This is much worse than average, almost all of it. Then I took a typing test, and got the absolute best typing score of my entire life:

even though I was completely out of shape the last hour, or at least felt that way. The (lack of) correlation is even more strongly noticeable on tests which target memory / language / attention directly, such as Cambridge Brain Sciences (which I really recommend; short tests taking 10 minutes a day to get a feel of how your brain is doing, in three key areas).

Gathering data

I am currently doing it via a couple of methods.

The Spreadsheed

This is the monster in its entirety

It has two goals: productivity and self-tracking.

Basics

The top part is basic information about the day, such as number of pages read, time spent in bed, number of steps etc etc. I think I’ll be slowly removing it and using something else instead.

The first column uses the old method of dividing the day in 100 10-minute intervals and writing what are you doing in each of them. It allows, firstly, to see what I spend my time on, and secondly, it works really well as motivation. If you write that you are “procrastinating” six intervals one after another, you really start feeling bad. You don’t have the “Oh, it’s 10pm already, where did my day go?” moment at the end of the day, you keep track of your activities every-damn-10-to-30-minutes. It’s wonderful. (Sometimes, I use this timer video for this)

Except the column where I write keywords about my activities, separated by semicolons (not “I was talking with X in his room”, but “social; talking; real-life”, to make it easier to analyze later), in the first part I also log:

Location

People with whom I did this

Food eaten

It’s nutritional values, if I feel like it

Medicines / supplements consumed.

Melancholy

The next blue part are some typical depressive symptoms, mostly inspired by this “Depression progress tracker” with a couple of additions I felt were interesting or lacking. Another source for this was the Immediate Mood Scale, linked is the appendix with the complete list of the items, but the entire paper is interesting. Also, here are some interesting theoretical considerations about measuring mood — it’s true, the deeper you get into something, the more complicated it is.

Good spirits

Good about myself

Calm and relaxed

Active and vigorous

Appetite

Interested in activities

Focus & Concentration

Aggressive

Impulsive

Guilty

Withdrawn

Manic

Fidgety

There I also track my top three physical symptoms:

Headache

Fatigue

Stomach problems

Brain fog

All this on scales from 0 to 100. When I feel like it, or remember about it, or have nothing to do and feel like procrastinating.

Money

How much, on what, and on which category. Additionally, recently added “how”, to differentiate shopping in real life with Amazon and similar ones. An inspiration for this was this blog post about the tracking, especially the idea of using the United Nations Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose for categorizing the expenses. It’s very well thought-out and definitely better than I could myself have made. It’s a nice reminder of not having to reinvent the wheel for everything I do, hah.

Details

Anything I want to add about the 10-min interval. Just like a mini twitter-like diary.

Dual-N-Back

In this area, I track DNB level and how many percent I got right.

I wrote just a bit about it here, but, of course, Gwern’s FAQ is the ultimate resource on the topic. Dual-N-Back is pretty much the only brain-training exercise which has been shown to transfer to other areas — that is, getting better at DNB actually means that the working memory in real life is getting better too.

…General Dreedle wants his [pilots] to spend as much time on the skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedule would allow. Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.
(From Catch-22, as quoted in the FAQ)

For me, it’s an exercise that hits right where it hurts — memory (short-term and working, I know that both are different but both are bad for me) and concentration (where else I get a 5-minute span where I can’t get distracted? Oh, meditation, about this later). Speaking of this, I knew that my memory was bad, but then comes Cambridge Brain Sciences and shows me daily workouts looking like this:

CBS on an unusually good day; about their objectivity I have my doubts.

The “reasoning” and “verbal” subdomains float quite a lot, but the memory one stays low, always. It’s nice to know what you fail at.

I hope DNB will help me. But I fully agree with Gwern on this — DNB is really interesting as an exercise by itself, even if it’s hard. Anything which puts you on your limits and lets you stay there, to explore them and get a feel of them, is interesting.

I have been doing DNB for a couple of months, got from Dual-2-Back to 70% right on Dual-3-Back, but have no way of measuring if it affected my memory during that time. I hope I’ll be able to do it more regularly now.

For DNB, my favourite program for the desktop is this web app, and on Android there are a couple of apps, but I really like Brain-N-Back, for its immense configurability and lack of disrupting adverts.

I got into this back when I was learning speedreading. It’s used for development of speed reading, peripheral vision, attention and visual perception 2Wikipedia, but for me it’s another way to stay concentrated. And to use my time, say, in the Metro, productively. I track grid size and time in seconds. This is the app I use and it’s awesome, also very configurable and without ads.

Cambridge Brain Sciences Tests

I log my C-Score and the scores in the three main domains, and the scores on the individual tests.

This is because I don’t really trust the C-Score as an objective method of assestment. I know that just a couple of paragraphs above I have written that it’s nice not to reinvent the wheel, but there are a couple of things which I find illogical or just don’t understand. The main one would be that the tests change day-to-day, and I’m much better at some tests than at others. I don’t like that this (pretty predictable) variation is shown as, say, my “reasoning” score for the day. Just how fluctuating it is can be seen here:

It’s clear on which days the tests are the ones I’m good at.

We’re talking about 6-7 points out of 23 max, which is a lot. On the “good” days, there must be one (or two) “good” tests, I’ll look later which ones.

Regardless, I think the scores on the individual tests are indicative of many things. It would be nice if CBS would offer their data in .csv format for easier analysis, but for now I’m stuck with entering the results manually.

Typing speed

Doing the tests using my absolutely favourite aoeu.eu, the one that taught me Dvorak, and sometimes typeracer.com. I take it as a measure of how overall in shape I am, but just how meanigful this is is one of the things I’d like to discover using QS. It’s easy to do and takes one minute, so no harm done either way.

Other ways to gather data

Not everything is practical to track in this cheatsheet. I use a couple of other programs, especially focusing on ones that allow exporting to .csv.

Nomie. Nomie is awesome. Like, really awesome. It has a number of trackers, which you can activate just by clicking on them (if needed — also set a value). Also the trackers can be set as positive/negative, and it shows the tally for the day. Examples of such trackers: Healthy snack, unhealthy snack, drinking alcohol, Manic, Anxious, peed, etc etc. And, of course, you can add your own. And it allows exporting to csv. It’s really great.

Simple data logger with graph. For when I’m on the go, and when it’s something numerically measured, like weight, when it’s okay if it’s added to the data in the spreadsheet. (Measuring weight one time more is not as bad as marking “showered” both on Nomie and on the spreadsheet, for example.) Also allows exporting to csv.

MyAddictometer — no export; it gives details about your phone usage, which can be enlightening.

Google Spreadsheets for Android — when possible, I attempt to upload the spreadsheets to Google Drive, to be able to edit it on my phone. This Google app works really well for reading and editing LibreOffice Calc’s files, with all conditional formatting etc.

In the future, I’d love to add a dump of my Telegram messages. (Here is a nice writeup on how to do that.) It’s data that already exists, and I could use it to infer basic stuff (sleeping patterns as one of them) without too much trouble. Probably the next post will be dedicated to it? Seeing when I write the biggest number of messages, to whom, etc. would be a very interesting exercise in visualization and data analysis.

The last hour, this happened.

Putting it all together

This is a big work in progress.

I’m planning to use it as a playground to remember Python and get a bit into Data analysis and statistics, I’ll need both in a couple of months.

Currently I have a shell script that converts all ODT files to csv. Then I have a python script (using the Pandas library, which is pretty neat) that divides the two parts of the spreadsheet — the “head” one and the tracking one. In the tracking one, it converts the times to datetime timestamps, and writes to a separate file %%timestamp%%-data.csv.

Next step (about an hour of work, given my three hours’ experience with Pandas) would be to append the data csv to a master data CSV file, if it hasn’t been already appended to it, and to make a master head-file, where rows would be days and columns would be the things I track daily, not in 10-minute intervals.

At the end, I should have a long CSV file with rows as intervals, and columns as data. And a couple of CSVs exported from various services.

Analyzing it all and actually making it useful

Graphing it all would be pretty trivial, and maybe visually I could start seeing relationships or correlations. For this, there are a couple of web services: Fluxtream seems promising. It’s not the only one that can connect to various sources, get your csv input, and start doing magic. It’s a topic I really do need to research better.

I could start doing experiments, in their classic sense, but for that I’d like to estabilish a baseline, which is what I’ll do this month. Then start additng/removing supplements (topic for another post), BWT, changing diet, etc.

For now, let’s focus on the tracking, and do it consistently (as strange as it sounds, I’m actually able to fill the spreadsheet every 10-40 minutes for the last 1.5 weeks; the apps will do their job by themselves, mostly.)

I should also really play with visualization (find my old Conky configs and fill them with TODOs and reminders?), since it works really well for motivation. Especially the once-a-day tracking. Part of a well-known effect, but was surprised to know there’s a subreddit dedicated to it. And something like this on my background would really motivate me:

And, lastly, just a dashboard on a terminal that I can switch to would also work wonders. … if I need a next step, research the motivation parts of it all, what visualizations work and why, what motivates me (is meta-quantifiedSelf a thing?), but we all know this won’t be happening, probably.

But again, all of this is far away.

If someone wants the current iteration of the spreadsheet — feel free to contact me, you’ll find how.

And, as usually, this post reflects my current view and understanding of the topic, everything subject to change (as it usually it does change). But that’s the beauty of this blog. Just opening the archives and seeing what I was up to two years ago is priceless. As Stephen Wolfram says on his blog:

And as I think about it all, I suppose my greatest regret is that I did not start collecting more data earlier.

I can say the same about this blog. I’m doing it not for the twelve and a half individual visitors a month that I’m getting, I’m doing it as writing practice (immensely therapeutical!) and as a way to record my very fleeting states of mind and interests for myself. And this has been going on for more than five years. Having the possibility of looking back is priceless and very gratifying. Given my awesome memory especially.

Would need some more math and care to make it start from another month — but do I need this?

Doing it via one of the two variants above, then manually editing

The LaTeX template

Should take a couple of hours, but the result will be worth it. Leaving it like this for now, but in September will take care of this.

I can also envision different calendars for different purposes, if I will need them, and this would mean the possibility to create a “backup” calendar in case I lose my main on.

We’ll see.

EDIT: I did it! Using the modified LaTeX script.With color-coded and numbered 1-week sprints, color-coded holidays in Germany and Ukraine, and birthdays of some of the people I care about. No screenshot for privacy reasons.

Later on, when I will have time / will get inspired, I will write a general outline of my heavily modified keyboard layout, with a couple additional modifier keys, a couple of remapped keys, and how it al plays nicely with the i3 windows manager.

Up next, sometime, I should do a right-hand version. A bit less useful (still have to learn to eat with my left hand), but much more flexible in terms of functionality. I can reach much more keys with my right hand.

Have a niche blog about what I learn to learn to write and learn to make niche websites with ads.

Before the end of the summer at least make a review of existing literature and a sketch of what exactly will make sense to implement

WriteLikeLennon

Would make sense only in VK as experiment

Not too interesting technically and done before

Kill it prolly?

Gesturehand

I can imagine it as a developed standard? Or a specification. Think RSS 1.0. Used as a semi-common language for gestures in many different contexts. Like there are certain expectations

Think about ideating / writing a generalized system

Probably the thing I’ll me concentrating on the most, and the one needing the most work

Excuse to learn AI and ML?

Try to at least get a shorthand system out of it.

My shorthand system

Create a name for it

A small writeup on how it works and basics

Intersections with Ithkuil

Again have it as a version.

It’s own /project page on pchr8.net

All before the end of the summer

Soft sciences

Pentachronological.

I really have no idea.

I could frame it as excuse to learn CSS3/frontent, to use my medium as much as possible, to express my creativity, whatever.

Before the end of the summer see if I want to keep it up, if yes — definitely think about a plot and at least a direction.

Meta

Don’t forget all the many small ideas I get.

And when thinking what to do exactly, think more along the lines of “is it interesting personally for me” and “what is the potential for learning” more than “does it have an audience” and “will it earn money”?

And lastly, don’t work on too much at the same time. Priorities atm are Gesturehand and Sparksara.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” (Twain)

It’s been quite a while since I wrote something in the Bits and Pieces category. I’m forgetting that the goal of this blog was partly documenting my own knowledge for my own use.Definitely need to hide this category from the front page and use it often. Or even better, make it a category on the wiki.

That said:

Vim digraphs

^M is how vim shows the 0xD character, which in Windows is a newline character. A more complete list of such characters is here: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html#digraph-table